Italy's Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who will visit the White House on Thursday, said that U.S. President Joe Biden had never challenged her on the issue of Rome being part of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

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ROME, July 23 (Reuters) - Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who will visit the White House on Thursday, said that U.S. President Joe Biden had never challenged her on the issue of Rome being part of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

Meloni leads the only major Western country to have joined China’s BRI scheme, which envisions rebuilding the old Silk Road to connect China with Asia, Europe and beyond with large infrastructure spending.

“The president of the United States has never directly raised the question with me,” she told a news conference following an international meeting on migration in Rome.

The deal was signed in 2019 under the administration of Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, drawing criticism from Washington and Brussels, and Italy is highly unlikely to renew it when it expires early next year.

It has produced little benefit for Italy over the past four years, with exports to China totalling 16.4 billion euros ($18.1 billion) last year from 13 billion euros in 2019.

  • Something_Complex@lemmy.worldEnglish
    31·
    1 year ago

    They do the same, perhaps. But if the truth comes out in the States it’s a scandal.

    If it comes out in China it’s a massacre.

    • Dojan@lemmy.worldEnglish
      23·
      1 year ago

      Does it matter if it’s a scandal or not when there are no repercussions? Are there not still concentration camps along the southern border? A plan that openly boasted about sexually assaulting people was elected president, and is still not in prison.

      China has done some heinous things, but let’s not pretend that the US hasn’t. Even for historical events that are being taught (like the trail of tears) the context is removed. Some things, like the Tulsa massacre aren’t mentioned at all. It’s said that slavery ended with the civil war, yet the last slave was freed in 1942 because the government at the time knew that their treatment of black people would be used as a point of entry for anti-American propaganda.

      They have repeatedly intervened in foreign governments and even executed coups to overthrow governments. Like the 1953 coup to overthrow the democratically elected prime minister of Iran because he wanted to nationalise their oil industry.

      As for social issues, women aren’t guaranteed access to abortion since the overthrowing of Roe v Wade the other year. Trans people don’t have access to life saving healthcare in most states. Prisoners are essentially stripped of human rights and forced into peonage, most prisoners also strangely being minorities/people of colour.

      The United States aren’t good guys. If I have to tolerate their antics, which by and large happen to set the tone for politics here in Europe, then I can tolerate China as well.